Armed guards to patrol check-in at American airports
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Your support makes all the difference.Armed police are to be posted at check-in counters at American airports in responses to the shooting at Los Angeles on 4 July when a gunman killed two people before being shot dead by a security guard for El Al airline.
The added precautions, announced yesterday by a new US government agency in charge of airline security, will involve uniformed and plainclothed guards. They will patrol all public areas at airports, including check-in counters.
The Transportation Security Agency said the incident, even if isolated, demonstrated that it could not be complacent towards any security measures at airports.
The background to the shooting itself remains a mystery. The American authorities had begun deportation proceedings against Hesham Mohammed Hadayet, the Egyptian-born assailant, in 1996, but these were dropped the following year when his wife, Hala, was granted permanent residency.
Though Israel maintains that the attack, at the El Al security counter inside Los Angeles international airport, was of a terrorist nature, all signs point to Mr Hadayet acting alone, for motives as yet unexplained.
Hassan Mostaf-Mahfouz, Mr Hadayet's uncle, said his nephew had been happy in America and would have been eligible for full citizenship in a year. "I don't believe what happened," the uncle said of how Mr Hadayet, fourth in a queue at the counter, suddenly pulled out a gun and fired almost a dozen shots, killing two people and wounding three others.
But Washington has plainly concluded that the heavier and more cumbersome security procedures used by the Israeli airline are essential if airports are to be made safer. As the TSA admitted, if the shooting had been at another airline counter without armed security guards, "the situation unfortunately would have been worse".
The agency would not say how many officers would be deployed, where they would be stationed or how soon the changes would be made. The TSA is taking on thousands of new security employees, whose job will be to look for suspicious individuals at airports and intervene where needed.
The Air Travellers Association, the main American passenger lobby group, welcomed the measures, but said guards must act in co-ordination with local police and security men.
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